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Nationalism is one of the central ideologies of the modem era. Not surprisingly, its hegemonic rise over the past 200 years has attracted considerable attention from historians, sociologists, and political scientists. Researchers have been especially preoccupied with those aspects of nationalism that have been most disruptive for existing social and political institutions, from the emergence of collective identification in newly forming nation-states and the struggle for statehood by minority groups to the sudden emptions of nativism and xenophobia in otherwise stable societies. Much of this literature has been based on the implicit assumption that in the absence of violent upheavals, nationalism in established democracies is simply a fait accompli rather than a source of continued social and political change.

In contrast, more recent studies have turned their attention to everyday forms of nationalism, arguing that the primacy of the nation-state as a unit of political governance and collective identification is continually reinforced - and sometimes subtly altered - through routine cognitive and affective orientations that are themselves products of institutional and ritual practices. Such work has shown that meanings attached to the nation are not uniform within a given national community, but systematically vary across individuals and social groups and are associated with other socially and politically relevant attitudes and behaviors. This article provides an analytical overview of this burgeoning literature, identifying its contributions, limitations, and potential for achieving a more nuanced understanding of nationalism in contemporary societies.

Traditional Nationalism Scholarship

The majority of research on nationalism falls within three broad traditions that investigate the origins of the nation-state as an institutionalized political form, the rise of new independent nation-states in the post-War period; and radical nationalist ideologies in contemporary societies.

Focusing on the historical emergence of the nation-state, the first approach is grounded in the observation that prior to the eighteenth century, the political authority vested in statelike institutions was rarely absolute or uncontested. Most states ruled over diverse populations sharply divided along lines of ethnicity, cultural tradition, religion, and language. It is only with the rise of the modern nation-state and its constitutive ideology of nationalism that state sovereignty became codified in both a territorial and cultural sense, with state subjects increasingly viewing themselves as members of a community with shared descent, customs, and collective fate (Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983). In the process, the nation became the source of the state's legitimacy and the congruence of the state's political and the nation's cultural boundaries became a taken-for-granted reality. Of course, this process was far from teleological; the rise of the nation-state came in fits and starts and was accompanied by protracted conflicts and institutionalized forms of intergroup domination.

The second tradition documents the rise of independent nation-states in the post-War period, most recently during the postcommunist transition in Eastern Europe. This literature is rich in case studies, but has been less effective at formulating general conclusions about nation-state formation and diffusion. Among the exceptions is Hechter's (2000) Containing Nationalism, which argues that nationalist movements are mobilized by centralized states' direct rule over culturally heterogeneous but territorially bounded populations. Viewing this as a problem for state stability, Hechter advocates policies that grant autonomy to minority populations. Another important theoretical contribution is Brubaker's (1996) study of ethnic relations in former Soviet republics and satellite states, which he sees as characterized by three distinct types of nationalism: 'nationalizing nationalism' of the newly sovereign states, 'minority nationalism' of domestic minority groups, and 'homeland nationalism' of coethnics in bordering countries. The interaction between these three political forces gives rise to state-driven social exclusion, oppositional stmggles for minority rights, and occasional eruptions of violence directed against states and their majority populations.

Finally, the third body of literature focuses on radical nationalist movements. Rather than aiming to reconfigure the political boundaries of existing nation-states, these movements attempt to mobilize members of dominant groups to resist changes to the nation's symbolic boundaries brought on by immigration or the extension of rights to oppressed native-born populations. These mobilization efforts are typically motivated by racially, ethnically, or religiously essentialist conceptions of the nation that explicitly exclude entire categories of people based on ascribed characteristics. Much contemporary research in this tradition focuses on Europe, which has experienced a resurgence of radical right-wing politics with strong ethnic nationalist tendencies (Taggart, 2000; Mudde, 2007; Bale, 2013). A distinct but substantively related line of research on the United States has focused on the country's long history of exclusionary politics based on nativist, racist, and fundamentalist ideologies (Higham, [1955]2002; Burris et al., 2000; Blee, 2002).

The above three approaches have generated many rich insights about the origins and continued importance of nationalist ideology in modern society. Yet, this classic work has largely ignored the more mundane - but no less important - aspects of everyday nationalism in stable democratic countries.

Nationalism in Settled Times

As a growing number of studies have demonstrated, the political significance of nationalism is not limited to periods of major political transformation or national crisis; nationalism exerts distinct effects on political change in settled times, although its impact is likely to be more subtle (Swidler, 1986). To understand this process, the analytical lens must shift from explicit political ideologies to tacit understandings of the nation's symbolic significance within a given polity. While most citizens of contemporary societies take for granted the legitimacy of the nation-state form, they often disagree in important ways about what their nation-state means to them. This variation - both within and across populations and over time - is an important feature of political culture that influences political behavior and drives policy change. Scholars have explored this dimension of nationalism from two vantage points: first, historical, ethnographic, and interpretive studies have explored the meaning-making processes that produce and maintain national identification; second, survey-based research has sought to map the variation in nationalist attitudes within and across populations and to demonstrate the impact of these attitudes on other political beliefs. Together, these approaches have laid the groundwork for a more complete understanding of nationalism in politically settled times.

Interpretive Studies of Everyday Nationalism

A long line of work in political sociology and political science has focused on how meanings attributed to the nation affect people's self-understanding and how such conceptions relate to a given country's overarching political culture. Classic studies in this tradition were based on a functionalist understanding of culture as a coherent system of agreed-upon values that facilitates social cohesion; this logically implied that the task for nationalism scholars was to uncover each nation's essential and stable cultural characteristics. For instance, in Continental Divide, Lipset (1990) argues that the national identity of the United States consists of the central tenets of the American Creed: antistatism, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism. In contrast, Canada - Upset's comparison case -prioritizes a distinct set of principles, including deference to authority, collectivism, elitism, and group-based particularism. Such large-scale cultural generalizations were typical of postwar scholarship, as exemplified by the work of Myrdal (1944), Hartz (1964), and the broader enterprise of consensus history.

An influential legacy of the functionalist approach has been the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, initially made by Friedrich Meinecke ([1907] 1970) and subsequently elaborated by Hans Kohn (1944). This binary opposition assumes a stable character to national identity, but differentiates between two alternatives: the first based on ascriptive criteria such as race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or language and the second on elective criteria, such as commitment to the country's core ideology, subjective identification with a national community, and respect for the nation's laws and traditions. This dichotomy has been used to classify the central ideologies of specific nations - with Germany as the prototype of ethnic nationalism and France of civic nationalism - and occasionally entire world regions.

The view of national culture as stable and homogenous has been challenged by more recent research. Rogers Smith's (1997) work on citizenship law in the United States, for instance, reveals a layered and often contradictory patchwork of legislation and court decisions informed by three distinct ideological perspectives (i.e., liberalism, republicanism, and 'ascriptive Americanism'), which have competed for dominance over the course of American history. Others have critiqued the ethnic-civic distinction on theoretical and empirical grounds for attributing essential properties to entire countries and regions and glossing over considerable within-country heterogeneity (Kaufmann, 2000; Shulman, 2002; Bmbaker, 2004; Ceobanu and Escandell, 2008).

Despite its limitations, functionalist research on national identity has generated a number of valuable insights. Perhaps most importantly, it has helped scholars recognize that even though nationalism has become a hegemonic ideology in modem society, the content of nationalist beliefs can be highly variable. This work has also highlighted the inherent tendency of nationalism toward social exclusion: given that nationalism is predicated on a fundamental belief in the unique characteristics of each nation, it inevitably draws sharp symbolic and social boundaries around national communities based on a range of arbitrary criteria. Of course, the need for distinguishing between members and nonmembers is necessary for every state's ability to fulfill its core functions, such as generating tax revenue, managing economic development, providing social programs, and ensuring national security, but how such distinctions are made and maintained is an important object of study.